Top Ten Tuesday is an awesome meme previously hosted by the lovely folks @ The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl
Bookish Pet Peeves
I actually did a post about this way back in 2014 (you can find the post here) and pretty much all of these I listed at the time still count among my bookish pet peeves today haha! So, I’m going to list some other bookish pet peeves I have. 😀
My top ten bookish pet peeves:
This really bugs me especially if I am requesting a book on Netgalley and lo and behold it is part of a series and I haven’t read the earlier books. This usually means I have to buy the earlier books because I can’t just pick up a book partway through a series. It also means it’s going to take longer for me to get to the book so not ideal.
This is a real bug-bear for me because I hate stickers on a book at the best of times but ones you cannot remove? Rage inducing!! Leigh Bardugo books in particular are now particularly guilty of this because of the Shadow and Bone Netflix series which now needs to be advertised on. Every. Single. Book. I’m so glad I bought these books years ago but feel bad for anyone just picking them up now.
This kinda leads in from the above pet peeve but it can be particularly irritating when an adaptation of a book or series of books is released and instantly the only editions you can find are tied-in to the adaptation. I am not against them per se but I hate how they become the only editions that places sell. I would rather have a choice.
My previous post linked above listed when publishers change cover art halfway through a series but equally annoying is when the books themselves are different sizes. I just hate the way they look on my shelves when they are differing heights – I like uniformity dammit!!
I am a collector of second-hand books (mainly YA) but I hate it when I buy a copy of a book and it turns out to be a library book. I have absolutely nothing against library books (I was an avid visitor of my local library in my youth) but I was put off when I found something… disgusting… in a library book (and I hate to say this was common). I also have OCD (mostly centering around cleanliness) so I am now a bit touch-averse to former library books. It’s annoying but what can you do? 🤷🏻♀️
If you buy vintage books you will probably have been burned by this. A lot of the time when you buy books second-hand you only see a stock image so you have no idea what edition you will get. I’ve been screwed many times over (even when taking into account the ISBN). I have four copies of the same edition of The Party by Christopher Pike just to give one example. It blows…
Every bookworm will experience this phenomenon at some point or another and it royally sucks, there’s no two ways about it. Bonus: it means you’ve just read a corker of a book but it makes everything else pale in comparison and can take a while to get over.
Some people love deckled edges. I absolutely loathe them. I think it makes the book look terrible and it makes it so much harder to flip through the pages (plus I tend to get loads of paper cuts with deckled edges – not sure why!) Deckled edges suck.
‘Never a borrower or a lender be’ is a quote that really resonates with me. I learned a lesson a long time ago to never lend a book unless you are prepared never to get it back. I’m probably guilty of the same thing so I am fully aware I’m being a touch hypocritical but it still is something that bugs me (I’m terrible at saying no to people but I’ve had to learn to be strong on this issue).
I mentioned bad fantasy covers in my last bookish pet peeves post but just as egregious is the prevalence of bare-chested male abs on romance covers (m/f and m/m books are both guilty of this). My other half calls these my ‘porno’ books but most of the time the smut is minimal (and I don’t really like smut anyway) so it’s not necessarily indicative of the content of the book (absolutely nothing wrong about liking more racy content – I’m definitely not ‘smut-shaming’!) 😉
pin it!
for more top ten tuesday posts, click the below link:
The heights of books and movie/tv covers bug me too!
I don’t like deckled edges either – it’s so much harder to turn the pages!
Naked Male Torso = the worst cover design ever. They all look identical and blur together in a wall of bland. That’s not the way to get me to read your synopsis, much less the book.
It stinks that you had a bad experience with a library book. Definitely cuts down on your cheap options in addition to making it harder to shop online (don’t even get me started on the lack of cover images among 2ndhand book sellers. Even a stock image — if it’s accurate to the edition, that is, which admittedly is also rare — would be welcome at this point).
–RS
Yes to pretty much all of these. I do not come across very many books with deckled edges though. Here is my link if you’d like to stop by: https://cindysbookcorner.blogspot.com/2021/10/top-ten-tuesday-bookish-pet-peeves.html